RSD displays the locations of amateur radio beacons around the world in Google Earth or Google Maps.
You can specify your own location (QTH) and determine the bearing and distance to any of the beacons mapped. A help bubble is displayed by clicking on each beacon marker on the map. The help bubble displays information about that beacon eg frequency, power, antenna, Maidenhead grid square, etc plus its distance and bearing determined by the highly accurate Vincenty equations.
The help bubble for your own location provides a link to a web page, where all the beacons are tabulated with their location and frequency plus their distance and bearing, so you can print them out. An example.
The display works in both Google Maps (latest browsers required) and Google Earth. We highly recommend the Google Earth version, as it is far quicker to use and much more convenient and more powerful. To do so you need to download Google Earth - it's free. To get a quick taste of RSD functionality you can try the Google Maps version first - it may be slow to load - follow the instructions as presented. The manual provides the full operational instructions primarily for the Google Earth version.
Try out the sample KML file. Turn the various beacon folders on and off using the Google Earth "places" control - left side in the middle.
The Radio Site Finder allows you to mark your location in GE. Pan and zoom the Google Earth display, to centre the white square on the point of interest and click on it. The help bubble contains a link to the Google Earth link generator page with your latitude and longitude already filled in determined from the location of the placed marker - typically your QTH. You can then retrieve the corresponding KML file.
Already know your QTH latitude and longitude? Use the Radio Site KML Generator to directly set up your location and to retrieve the corresponding KML file.
The world is divided up into the following regions:
10 and 6 metre beacons are considered worldwide. Anything above those frequencies are considered regional. In the latter case, this means you can only see beacons in your own region. There is generally one database per region. The regions are self-explanatory.
Data for the beacons is based on work by the following people or groups:
In some cases the underlying data is hosted directly by the people or groups acknowledged above, who keep them up to date. All they are required to do is to store a CSV file on their server and let us have access to it. MySQL databases can also be used. Any volunteers for S_AMERICA?
For further information please contact David VK3HZ - see very bottom of this page.
All Google rights acknowledged etc. - thanks for the great mapping software: GE and GM.